Wake-Up Call: Throwing the book

Here's the great thing about a book. Once you have it in your hands, it never goes offline. The Denver Office of Cultural Affairs hasn't been so lucky with the web site where the city's residents are invited to help choose the next One Book, One Denver selection. Voting allegedly started on June 1, but the online ballot wasn't up all day.

Even so, we managed to take a sneak peak at the list of 27 options, and can safely say that it includes none of the candidates we've been pushing for the last few years. Not Plainsong or Eventide by Colorado author Kent Haruf, not On the Road, Jack Kerouac's epic odyssey that celebrated its fiftieth anniversary two years ago; not Ask the Dust by John Fante, a Denver native who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday this year; not Mark Twain's Roughing It, which would have been particularly apt as Colorado celebrates the 150th anniversary of 1859's Rush to the Rockies.

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword, Denver’s News and Arts weekly, in 1977; she’s been the editor there ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly Colorado Public Television roundtable Colorado Inside Out, the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies -- a post that got her an unexpected interview with former President Bill Clinton in front of a thousand people (while she was in flip-flops) -- and played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City.